Sunday, 8:00 AM. 25 degrees, wind ENE, gale force. We are approaching white-out conditions, and have gotten 3” of snow.
Church service has been canceled.
The snow is fine and crystalline, driven into every nook and cranny by the relentless wind, which now roars through the trees. The infamous blizzard of 1888 was 120 years ago and although this will not reach those ancient proportions, it is a respectful reminder.
The temperature is falling and I am glad I scraped the snow off the drive before it froze tight to it.
There is a certain glory to such weather and I am tempted to go for a hike in it somewhere, but prudence prevails and I will have plenty of it shoveling snow.
Folks who think man can control nature need to poke their noses into a blizzard once in awhile. All we can do is stay out of the way or pick up the pieces.
“We’re having an old fashioned winter,” people my age will say. That’s exactly what my folks said sixty and more years ago, what their parents and grandparents said when they were children, and what children of today will say sixty years hence, after we have gone through yet another cycle of weather…periods of harsh winters followed by mild, and then repeated all over again, in nature’s unrelenting cycles of decades, centuries, millennia; of repeated, undulating weather patterns. They are not precisely predictable but all will come and go, in their own good time. We moderns measure minutiae, and ignore history.
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